Conservative duplicity on education cuts

If you get a chance, check out today’s Weekly Briefing. This week’s edition explores the duplicitous nature of recent conservative statements on education cuts — in particular, the claims of House Speaker Tillis and his adjunct staff at the Pope-Civitas Institute that conservatives took “positive steps for education” by increasing the number of state-funded teacher jobs.

What Tillis and Pope-Civitas don’t like to remind most people, of course, is that conservative tax cuts in North Carolina combined with obstructionism in Washington helped assure that K-12 schools would still suffer a completely unnecessary net loss of nearly 5,000 educators — even with the budget shuffling theyengaged in to make the cuts seem lower.

As usual with these people, the message varies with the audience: For the Tea Party types, Tillis et al brag about about slashing government and privatizing education (i.e. what they”ve really done). In polite company like the editorial pages, however, they go all warm and fuzzy and start making noises about saving teacher jobs.

frances

First: Who are “the haters”?Second: A post here in June “State budget will leave 30,000 without jobs, BTC analysts say” indicated that this was a projected number of statewide job losses, public and private sector, not just teaching positions, over two years. That was 6 months ago, still 18 to go. Seems we’re well on our way.Third: The lottery money still goes to education but it’s replacing money that should have come from the general fund. The original claim and selling point was that it would be in addition to regular education funding, and would not supplant it. That promise has gone by the wayside, as many people expected it would. Refer to: Where the money goes

I might also add that moving $80 million of lottery money from school construction to teacher salaries in one year constitutes a loss of at least 2,280 construction related jobs, (and perhaps more, as lottery funds are used for debt service).